Ah, yes, Whelan's cover for the paperback edition of Foundation's Edge. Never did have any idea what the cover meant in relation to the novel's story. Doesn't stop me from loving it, though.

Click to expand...

According to Whelan's site, Asimov said this about that cover: "It seems to me to be rather marvelous to be able to illustrate not a concrete scene but an abstract imponderable, and in such a way that it seems to brighten and deepen the book even to the writer himself."

The only problem I had with the cover is that it made me imagine a book so amazing and epic I don't think it could have been written.

Click to expand...

There's nothing that moves in that painting(at least to the visible eye)...but the whole thing looks like there is motion or a sense of depth that's pretty astounding.

I know there the four R. daniels novels. I was just wondering what are the other robot books and is there a reading order?

Click to expand...

The reading order is today much debated, with some people favoring the publication order and others favoring the internal chronological order.

For a number of reasons, I don't think that internal chronological order works for first-timers, as certain developments get spoiled way too early.

The robot novels should be read in order -- Caves, Naked Sun, The Robots of Dawn, Robots and Empire. You can read I, Robot before, in the middle, or after, even though that book takes place very early. The other robot short stories you can read at almost any time; they have little direct bearing on the Foundation mythos.

I read these when they came out and liked them. They were fun, but they weren't always true to Asimov's world and they did a number of things that I thought were "end runs" around the Three Laws. Still, I liked the ideas in the books. I prefer the first six books (the Robot City) books to the last six (Robots and Aliens). The characters return in four mystery novels published by iBooks about a decade ago, three by Mark Teidemann and one by Alex Irvine.

No, iBooks was a publishing company of Byron Preiss' before his death. Preiss was the packager behind the Robot City books back in the 80s.

Foundation's Friends was okay. I'd recommend getting the trade paperback edition -- it has more material than the hardcover and mass market editions. Most of the stories aren't anything great, but Orson Scott Card's "The Originist" is very good.

2035: Susan Calvin is beginning her residency at a Manhattan teaching hospital, where a select group of patients is receiving the latest in diagnostic advancements: tiny nanobots, injected into the spinal fluid, that can unlock and map the human mind.

Soon, Susan begins to notice an ominous chain of events surrounding the patients. When she tries to alert her superiors, she is ignored by those who want to keep the project far from any scrutiny for the sake of their own agenda. But what no one knows is that the very technology to which they have given life is now under the control of those who seek to spread only death...

Unfortunately, there's not much good to say of the books that have been written by other authors.

Click to expand...

I disagree. Yes, Greg Benford's Foundation's Fear is not very good (it has some good ideas, but they're not Asimovian ideas or developed in an Asimovian way), but Greg Bear's Foundation and Chaos was solid and David Brin's Foundation's Triumph was easily the best official Foundation novel since Foundation's Edge. (I have to qualify that. Donald Kingsbury's Psychohistorical Crisis is actually better, but it's not an official Foundation novel.)

Also, Roger MacBride Allen's Caliban trilogy is excellent. There are a few things I quibble with, but the storytelling is good, the characters are well drawn, and the writing is top-notch.

killed off this Gaia-nonsense once for all (after all, the Foundation survived, there was after all quotes from Encyclopedia Galactica in the books).

Click to expand...

Then you should read Foundation's Triumph, because that's an idea that Brin develops there. Brin's idea was that if there is a Gaia/Galaxia, then there's no need for an Encyclopedia Galactica. But since there is an Encyclopedia Galactica, then it follows that the Foundation triumphs over both the Second Foundation and Galaxia. That's why Brin quotes from a later edition of the EG than Asimov does.

I was really dissappointed in the first of the "Second Foundation Trilogy". The other two books were better (and I noticed that passage you quoted there), but I feel like "Foundation and Chaos" and "Foundation's Triumph" had to spend a lot of time to try to fix the problems from the first book (wormholes, really???).

But, it was a long time I read these, and I recently begun to go through the Robot/Empire/Foundation-books again (are there a good shorter name for this series), so we have to see if I change my mind.

"Robots in Time" are awful, though. Haven't read the Caliban trilogy yet. The "Robot City"-stuff and the "spinoffs" are okay-ish. Better than "Robots in Time", but that doesn't say much.. )

Some stories in "Foundation's Friends" are quite good, actually, though.

Still want to see a book that takes place after "Foundation and Earth", though. I would recommend an eventual merging of the first and second foundation.

I think Foundation's Triumph had some rather nice observations about Asimov's future history. The comparisons between the Empire and the Chinese dynasties was also a nice touch and the observation that the Seldon plan would ultimately triumph was a good observation on the part of the writers. The chaos fever idea and how it caused instability throughout civilization I thought was a load of rubbish as was the robots potentially committing mass genocide on the rest of galaxy to secure a human dominant universe.

I was really dissappointed in the first of the "Second Foundation Trilogy". The other two books were better (and I noticed that passage you quoted there), but I feel like "Foundation and Chaos" and "Foundation's Triumph" had to spend a lot of time to try to fix the problems from the first book (wormholes, really???).

Click to expand...

If you're disappointed with those, I highly recommend reading Psychohistorical Crisis by Donald Kingsbury. Sadly, it's not a licensed book, so all place names and characters have been changed, but all in all, I think it's more in spirit with the rest of Asimov's work than the actual Second Foundation. It was released around the same time as the Second Foundation trilogy, so I'm guessing that's why it didn't get the blessing of the estate, but to me it absolutely captured what made Asimov great.

Psychohistorical Crisis was great. Definitely a novel I need to re-read at some point.

The three books of the Second Trilogy all blur together for me at this point, but it was an ill-advised project. They should have just created their own universe to develop their ideas in; in terms of being respectful to the source material, it was disastrous.

I'd be happy to write Foundation And Galaxia, though. Asimov felt he had written himself into a corner, but I know a very Asimovian way out of it.